Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

The slope angled sharply up and became a sheer wall. Morgan and Chung played their lights against it, against the wall, and we were able to make out an indentation. A cut. It started at the crest and reached down about ten meters.

I thought maybe it had been caused by a meteor strike.

“Look again,” said Morgan.

It was precisely sliced. The indentation was box-shaped, maybe four meters wide. Not quite as deep. The lights reflected off a rear wall only few paces back.

“This is where the granite came from,” said Morgan. “For the statue.”

We climbed to the top of the crest and found more prints, and a slice of relatively flat terrain where the snow had been crushed down. Bits and pieces of loose granite were scattered everywhere. We looked at one another. Several of us spoke at the same time: “This is where it made Jennifer.”

“We’ll collect the pieces of rock,” said Steinitz. “We should be able to put them together and confirm that.”

“But how the hell did it manage things?” asked Morgan. “Assume it had some sort of laser. How’d it extract the granite?” There were no marks other than the prints. And the prints didn’t get any deeper. Even had it been Superman and lifted the rock out by sheer physical strength, the prints would have gone deeper from the added weight.

“Anti-gravity,” Chung said.

Steinitz cleared his throat. “Not possible.”

“Well,” said Morgan, “it’s hard to see how else it could have been done, There must have been a ship here somewhere. To lift it and her back down to the plain.”

We spread out and looked for other marks in the snow, but found nothing. If there’d been a ship, maybe it had possessed long narrow struts, and the granular composition of the snow simply didn’t retain the impressions. Maybe they had teleportation.

We gradually made sense out of the footprints. They first appeared on the downslope. Then they mounted to the ridge without immediately going near the place from which the rock had been taken. Instead they continued up along the summit. A second set of tracks returned. These then wandered along the ridge. She had spent a fair amount of time walking back and forth. She’d spent time a half-meter away from the cut, and spent more time around the borders of the flattened snow. Then, abruptly, in the middle of the snow, the prints stopped. Somewhere in the confusion, she vanished. No prints led away from the site.

“So she came in this general direction,” said Morgan, “but passed by this area and went up there .” He pointed along the crest, where it rose higher and climbed toward a series of ridges. “Then she came back here, made her cut, produced Jennifer, and disappeared. Along with Jennifer, who later turns up on the plain. Is that what we’re saying?”

“What do you suppose she was doing up there?” asked Chung, looking at the ridges.

“Probably,” Steinitz said, “trying to decide where she wanted to work.”

“It might be worthwhile to take a look,” I said. “See where the tracks go.”

There was no way, of course, we would not have done that. We told Smitty what we’d found, sent off lots of images, listened to him tell us we were probably missing something, that none of the stuff we were talking about was possible. Then we set off to follow the tracks along the rising ridge line.

Sometimes they petered out on rocky ground. Twice, before sheer walls, the prints stopped altogether, and we recovered them farther up.

The plain with the figure lay behind us. From the tops of the ridges, we could see forward across a large crater. Saturn rested on the far rim.

We emerged, finally, atop an abutment. The prints stopped. The creature appeared to have paused at the summit, perhaps glancing back the way it had come. (The artifact was out there now in the middle of the snow field, though not visible in the muted light.)

And she might have looked west, across the crater, at the planet and its ring system. Then, apparently, she had started back.

Steinitz stood a long time, staring at the mild confusion of tracks. When at last he merely shrugged, it was a gesture that said it for us all.

We took more pictures and stayed well away from the prints. It was cold. Steinitz said something about nothing more to do here, and he started back. “Good with me,” Chung said. She fell in line behind him.

Morgan glanced in my direction and stood aside to let me go first.

“You go ahead,” I said. “I’ll be right with you.”

“You sure?”

“Yes. I’ll catch up.”

He looked uncertain. It was a violation of safety procedure, but I let him see there was no need to worry, so he shrugged and headed off.

Jennifer had been alone.

The stars were hard and cold, and the spaces between them pressed on me as they must have pressed on her. Saturn floated over the plain, its rings luminous and lovely. A few other moons scattered across the sky. It struck me the planet had not moved since she’d stood here, how long ago?

I thought about Chung. And Melville. Moby Dick . I’d never read the book. But I’d seen the video. There’s a sequence in which the cook is washed overboard and drifts away from the ship. The seas are heavy, and a moment comes when water and sky fill the universe, when the Pequod is gone, and the cook is utterly alone . They do not get him back whole.

The image on the plain is terrifying, yes. But not because it has claws and wings, or pitiless eyes. But because it is alone.

I was beginning to feel the cold, and it was a long way back to the shelter. I looked up (as she must have). Titan was there, with its thin envelope of methane; Rhea and Hyperion, and some of the smaller satellites: frozen, spinning rocks, like this one, immeasurably old, no more capable of supporting a thinking creature than the bloated gasbag they circle. Steinitz had argued for a benevolent cosmos. But Steinitz had never stood alone on that ridge. Only I have done that.

And one other.

The universe is a precarious, cold haven for anything that thinks. There are damned few of us, and it is a wide world, and long. I wondered who she was. Long since gone to dust, no doubt. But nevertheless, Jennifer , I wish you well.

As I write this, there’s a movement afoot to take the Iapetus monument down, to bring it home and install it in the Smithsonian. There, they’d probably put it in a refrigerated cubicle, try to recreate the snowfield appearance. They’d surround it with gleaming staircases and Coke machines. Maybe it doesn’t matter. I suspect her sculptor would be pleased, and possibly amused.

Before we left to come home, we opened the ground module to space. If anyone else ever passes that way, it’ll be there, just the way we left it. And on the dining board, they’ll find my ID. It’s not a very good picture. You know how official photos are. But they’ll understand. It was the best I could do on short notice.

The applause after a dissertation defense is always polite, sometimes cool, but rarely sustained. Kristi Lang smiled and blushed as all fifty members of her department rose to their feet and cheered. Her fellow graduate students were the rowdiest of all, whistling and banging their coffee cups in unison on chairs and table tops. Greg Cooper, the department head and her mentor, let it go on for a full minute.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said finally, “thank you very much.”

If anything, the noise intensified.

He needed a gavel.

Kristi stood, engulfed in the moment. She nodded, raised her hand, mouthed a thank you . A fresh round of applause, and finally it began to lessen.